Scotland

John McTernan’s latest Telegraph column has an entertainingly provocative headline –Tell the Truth: Scotland has been indulged for far too long – but is, in fact, less a blast against Alex Salmond’s monstrous regiment than an assault upon Mr McTernan’s colleagues in the Scottish Labour party. This attack is disguised by John’s observation – scarcely controversial and, anyway, being addressed, in part, by the Scotland Bill – that the Barnett Formula is no longer working as originally intended. He’s right that much of Scotland has prospered since Margaret Thatcher came to power; it’s also the case that the Labour party, above all others, has persistently denied this. As John must

What does Independence in Europe mean in 2011? That’s one of the questions Alex Salmond and the SNP have preferred not to ask, far less find an answer to. Way back in the dog days of the Thatcher-era Jim Sillars coined the slogan as a way to demonstrate that Scotland, small and on the periphery of the continent, would not be cut adrift and helpless were her people persuaded to back the Scottish National Party’s vision for independence. It was a canny move: reassuring and progressive and other nice and cosy things. That was then and this is now. The ongoing crisis in Euroland necessarily means things have changed. The

Perhaps it is time for Glasgow to become a Charter City: More than a third of people in Glasgow North East have no school qualifications. A table published by the University and College Union (UCU) showed 35.3% of those of working age left school without passing a single examination. The result gives the area the lowest rating in the UK. Every Edinburgh constituency was placed in the top third for educational achievement. Every constituency in Glasgow was below the British average. No matter how many allowances you make for Glasgow’s peculiar circumstances – post-industrialisation, redrawn city boundaries that exclude middle-class suburbs and so on – this is depressing stuff. If

Sorry Pete, but I don’t think there’s anything hugely ambiguous about the result from the Inverclyde by-election. This was a pretty solid victory for Labour and another reminder – if these things are needed – that Westminster and Holyrood elections are played by different rules. Labour and the SNP ran neck-and-neck in the gibberish spin stakes last night as some Labour hackettes, preposterously, tried to claim that the seat “was the SNP’s to lose”; for their part the nationalists tried to suggest they’d never been very interested in winning Inverclyde at all. More weapons-grade piffle. Then again, without this stuff how would anyone fill the weary hours of television before

Here’s a clue for politicians: when you’re asked if you’ve just criminalised the national anthem and all you can do is say “Er, maybe, it all kinda depends on the circumstances” the chances are you’ve produced a bill that tests even the patient, hard-to-exhaust, limits of parliamentary absurdity and you should probably put it through the shredder and start again. If, that is, you should even be legislating in these matters at all. We do things differently in Scotia New and Braw, don’t you know? So today the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee took evidence on the government’s planned and loopy and shameful and illiberal Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening